Salvere Farm

Time to pick your scapes. Almost everyone who picks scapes will end up with a larger bulb. Garlic scape pesto is my favorite way to eat them although I also like them grilled.

This was taken a couple weeks ago. But garlic is up and growing and even taller now. 2020 sales season will open June 1st.

Time to mulch. I use about 100 small square bales of straw from my neighbor. Straw has some grain seed in it but not many weeds. Helps protect the ground and garlic over winter and moderates soil temperature and moisture during the growing season.

Planting time

Website is open for ordering. www.salverefarm.com Order early to guarantee you get the size and variety you want. New varieties for 2019 include Khabar, Metechi, Aomari, and Persian Star.

I am busy breaking apart garlic to plant starting tomorrow. It is not too late to order and get some more varieties in the ground. Orders ship within a day and there are still various amounts of a handful of varieties left in stock.

Botany of garlic There are many different kinds of garlic and they’re almost all different in size, color, shape, taste, number of cloves per bulb, pungency and storability. Most consumers aren’t aware of the many kinds since they seldom see more than one kind in the local supermarket. There are said to be over 600 cultivated sub-varieties of garlic in the world, although most of them are selections of only a handful of basic types that have been grown widely and developed ...their own characteristics over the centuries as local growing conditions changed. Botanists classify all true garlics under the species Allium sativum. There are two subspecies: Allium sativum var. ophioscorodon, the hard-necked varieties. Allium sativum var. sativum, the soft-necked varieties. The hard-necked garlics were the original garlics and the soft-necked ones were developed or cultivated over the centuries by growers from the original hard-necks through a process of selection. The latest research in 2003 shows that ten fairly distinct varietal groups of garlic have evolved. Five very different hardneck varieties called: Porcelain Purple Stripe Marbled Purple Stripe Glazed Purple Stripe Rocambole. Three varieties of weakly bolting hardnecks that often produce softnecks: Creole Asiatic Turban Two distinct softneck varietal groups: Artichoke Silverskin Dr. Gail Volk of the USDA in Colorado and Dr. Joachim Keller of the Institute of Plant Biology in Gaterslaben, Germany, independently performed DNA analysis of garlics and classified them in 2003. Previously it had been thought that there were only five varietal groups. All of the hundreds of sub-varieties (separate cultivars) of garlic grown all over the world came from these ten basic groups or sub-varieties of hardnecks that evolved in the Caucasus Mountains between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. The individual characteristics of varieties have been altered over time by careful (or accidental) selection and changing growing conditions, such as soil fertility, rainfall, temperature, altitude, length and severity of winter, etc. as they spread across Asia and Europe. The Asiatics and Turbans developed in the East, while the Creoles developed in Spain and southern France and Artichokes and Silverskins developed in Italy and elsewhere in Europe. See more

Some music, a beer, and hundreds of pounds of garlic getting cleaned. Not a terrible Friday evening.

Garlic harvest about half done but today is a rest day for back and hands. Watching some golf this morning instead.

Donald and Vladimir would like this variety. Russian Red.

I guess it is summer. Website is up and ready for ordering. Let me know if you find a glitch. Gremlins always seem to mess something up in between seasons. Crop is looking good after a late start to spring.

Still fairly snowy in upstate NY but I can feel the garlic ready to burst through to the sunshine.